A New Chassis, new motors and fancy troughs

 So we've been designing a new chassis, based partly on the original, but with a few new ideas added. 

The coffee and biscuits are a key part of the design process though may not be part of the final implementation. These are HLC208 encapsulated brushless motors with the controller electronics built-in. They also have their own direction selection feed as well as an accurate speed output. 

The supplier website gave instructions for testing these out and some sample code, but that did little other than turn the motor. Adding an extra earth and scrapping their example code in favour of hastily written test code got them working nicely, variable speed, direction changes and feedback with very little cpu time involved. Very simple to use when you know how!!!! We'll see how they progress.

Now that we have some stl files for the Hungry Cattle troughs from the organisers, we thought investing some print time in creating three accurate troughs with halfway lines printed in. And here they are, they look ok, though we did get one line not quite right!! So just have to fill to above the line!

Next up will be the new hopper emptying mechanism, should be a bit faster than last time.